PUBLIC trust in the European Union (EU) slumped to an all-time low in the Eurozone's six biggest countries, a survey revealed last night.

Students in Spain, where anti-EU feeling is soaring, demonstrate against cuts []

Figures from Eurobarometer, the EU’s own polling organisation, ­suggest that anti-Brussels feeling has spread far beyond Britain and is rising in both poor and better-off EU nations.

It follows the continuing euro-zone economic crisis which has sent unemployment soaring and led to a string of multi-billion pound taxpayer-funded bailouts.

Results showed 66 per cent of voters in Britain say they “tended not to trust the EU as an institution”.

A majority shared that view in Italy (53 per cent), France (56 per cent) and Germany (59 per cent) while in crisis-hit Spain the figure has soared to 72 per cent.

The findings are understood to have triggered alarm among Brussels bureaucrats because the six countries surveyed – those above plus Poland – account for 350 million of the EU’s 500 million citizens.

The figures were seized upon by campaigners last night as the latest evidence that Euro scepticism is no longer confined to the UK.

Tory MP Douglas Carswell said: “This is extremely encouraging. It shows that we Brits are not alone and voters in other European countries are beginning to realise that the EU is bad for Europe.

“It shows we can work with other democracies to defeat the Brussels empire. Its days are numbered.”

Tim Aker, of the anti-Brussels campaign group Get Britain Out, said: “Millions of people across the continent are seeing their livelihoods go up in smoke thanks to the EU’s fanatical belief in the euro and ever-closer union.

“The EU is just going to get ever more unpopular in the UK and our referendum can’t come soon enough.”

And Tory Euro-MP Martin Callanan, leader of the European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament, said: “These figures should act as a wake-up call to the EU.”

This is extremely encouraging. It shows that we Brits are not alone

Tory MP Douglas Carswell

Figures in the survey – part of a regular measurement of support for Brussels – showed that trust in the EU had fallen from 10 per cent to minus 22 per cent in France since the eurozone crisis began in 2007. There were similar falls in Germany and Italy while in Poland the trust rating fell from 50 per cent to six per cent.

In the UK, trust plunged from minus 13 per cent to a low of minus 49 per cent. In Spain, it fell far further – from 42 per cent to minus 52 per cent.

The figures, which add further momentum to the Daily Express’s crusade for Britain to quit the EU, were published through the European Council on Foreign Relations, a pan-European think tank.

An article from the council said: “Once it was seen as a British disease but Euro scepticism has now spread across the continent like a virus.”